What’s happening next?

It’s the end of the year, and it’s an interesting time to reflect on our progress and where we are going.

Last year in December we were pushing hard to open the Closed Alpha and nearly 50 weekly updates later, I must say that we have come a long way and we have pushed some major features as:

And so much more.

But all this work does not take us out of the Alpha version.

Not yet.

Tau Station is still in an infant stage and more work will be needed to let it grow to its full potential.

But what does that mean for 2019?

Some exciting new features:

  • Syndicate Buildings
  • Cargo Ships
  • Bounties
  • Syndicate Raids
  • Crafting
  • Elite-style Trading
  • Personal Assistants
  • Asteroid/ice mining
  • “Best Blogs”

Some new items:

  • Weapons
  • Armors
  • Grenades
  • New Ships
  • Commodity goods
  • Circuit boards
  • Construction matrix

It also means some rework and better balancing:

  • Combat
  • Drink and Stim consumption
Combat will use the entire screen: on the left will be the countdown until guards arrive by the combat log. Avatars will be bigger, but still the UI will be more compact due to re-arrangements.
Work in progress design of the combat rework

Some redesign:

  • CORETECHS
  • Government Center
  • Side Jobs

And of course:

  • Missions
  • University courses
  • Career ranks
  • Career prerequisite and benefit

And so much more….

But that’s not all.

2019 will also be the year of the creation of the citizen council.

From the beginning, it has been essential to us to develop Tau Station as a universe, as a place where you can escape. I do not believe we can achieve this objective without listening to you.

And we have been, as demonstrated by the numbers of tickets that you have opened and we have closed since the beginning of the closed alpha.

However, I believe it’s not enough. I would like to see even more cooperation between us, the people developing Tau Station and you, our citizens.

A group of Tau Station characters in a collage.

Therefore, in January 2019 we will hold our first election of your representatives. A special blog post and forum will be dedicated to the citizen council at the beginning of the year, but the spirit is the following:

From beginning of 2019, we will run a general election every 6 months. Each council member will sit for 6 months before election are called again. Each member can only sit for 3 terms, consecutive or not before he gets excluded and cannot run again.

Election will be kept as simple as possible, with 4 phases lasting 2 weeks each.

  • The submission period where people can submit their application.
  • The verification period where we will be matching candidate to criteria’s (to be able to vote or be elected, a person will have to have an active account, has played Tau Station at least once in the past tenspan and be at least level 4).
  • The promotion period where applicants will be able to write down their vision, and to optionally submit videos for the Community to know what they stand for.
  • The election

Two buttons symbolizing choices with "yes" and "no"In order to have the council handle a topic, it will have to be raised on the forums by somebody, either a regular citizen or a council member.

That topic will have to be open for (forum) discussion for at least 7 days before it can be put on the council agenda. Once the topic has been open for discussion for at least 7 days a council member or a player can request it to be put on the council agenda, without the right for the council to refuse.

When a topic has been put on the council’s agenda it’s discussed and voted on by the council to determine whether a topic will be presented to the Tau Station representatives.

Topics presented to the Tau station representatives will be discussed with the council. They will be either accepted or rejected in writing in 30 days.

If accepted they will be put in the development process.

The Council meeting should be held at least every two weeks, but it will be left to the discretion of the council.

The Council will meet with Tau Station representatives every 2 months. Topics that will be presented to the Tau Station staff will be put on writing and send to Tau Station representative at least one week before the meeting.

We hope by introducing the player’s council we will make it easier to prioritize the features that you really want as a group.

But what’s happening this month? Why wasn’t there an update this week?

No, this week there was no update and you should only expect one more update this month.

This year was all about creating a proof of concept. We have it.

Tau Station is there, and you are already part of this universe that we want to create. To that we are very grateful, but we need to move past the Alpha stage and work hard on the challenging new features that we have for you. We need to address balancing and get it right, and we also need to work on the aesthetics of Tau Station, to make it more welcoming.

Therefore, it seems that if we want to make things right, at least for the next 3 months we need to move to a monthly update frequency.

But you promised us syndicate campaigns…

Did you really believe that we were going to end this year without keeping our promises?

Before the end of the month, we are going to release syndicate campaigns and a few more things, but I will keep it a surprise.

The UI shows your stats on the upper left, below recent fighters of your syndicate are listed with their avatars and stats about attacks and wins. Below this, your inventory is listed. The major part of the UI takes like 75% of the screen: Opponents are listed in several rows, grouped by tiers. Results, respectively, options like attack are on the right of every enemy line.
A work in progress design for the upcoming syndicate campaigns

A portrait photo of Leila Contraire, smilingI hope you are as excited as I am at the perspective of 2019. I really believe, that with your collaboration, 2019 should be the year of Tau Station.

Thank you for being part of this adventure, and as usual, the forum is open if you have any questions.

 

Best, Leila